More on presumption

She walked into the room, focused in on me and said with a certain triumph, "today I had a 39 year old woman deliver without complications"
I congratulated my friend, my mid-wife friend, but expressed curiousity at the signficance of the event "is that unusual?"
"Oh, no, it's just that she also had no problem conceiving. Got pregnant the first month she tried"
I didn't even know what to do with that piece of information but like a moth to the flame I pursued.
It seems my friend, who sees babies delivered daily, who deals with the business of fertility and feasibility and viability where little little littluns are concerned every single day had observed this particular miracle of life with me in mind.
She had decided that I really did need to have a baby in my life. She was excited that there was still, in all likeliness, time for me to do so, without desperate measures. Still hope.
I could already see the gestation of this thought pattern.
A week earlier her brother, one of my closest friends, had walked in the room and had engaged in a fertility discussion of his own, although not necessarily as angled at me. It was, in fact, about his own good news. But when we travelled into the discussion of age and fertility and timing and such I had made a (contextually appropriate) joke about my own.
"Yes, but you never want to have kids"
"Where did you get that idea?"
"I don't know, I just did somewhere along the way"
"Nope, you probably got it the same place you got that I didn't bellieve in marriage...for myself, I mean"
Assumptions. I don't know.
Thie thing is, I sort of feel like, if a friend of mine had expressed a desire to opt out of one or many of life's big milestones. I'd make an extra special extra note. I'd highlight it. I don't know why, I just feel like I'd be surprised and then I'd know.
I'm not saying that all of life revolves around coupling and marriage and kids. I'm just saying, you know, most people get involved, either by design or default, and the decision to remove oneself from this cycle, or reject a step society seems rather focused on emphasizing, tends to say something about one's own unique life path and values.
So, in the same vein, I find it odd that people would assume disinterest on my part in partaking in things that most people plan their entire lives around, when I had never ever explcitly expressed such disinterest.
Heck, I even like kids. Kids like me.
I think.

But, this is neither the time or place to go into my actual life plan, or lake therof.
And true, I am not the matronly sort. I curse with abandon and come home late.
But then, I don't have kids. Why would I be motherly if I don't have something to mother?
I am more here to express fascination with what I believe this says about me, and my friends, and how people interact and what they gleen from what you discuss. How they judge who you are and what they believe your life's priorities to be from what you wear, what you do, who you know, and know well.

So I find myself making a list. A roll call of all the indirect signs and markers that cause me to draw major conclusions, even the more abstract ones, about my friends. What is it, in what they wear, how they speak, where they like to go and what they like to do that allows me to envision and path and what they path contains. And I suddenly have a whole new list of questions to ask. Maybe you do too.